SOLVED - HDMI audio "not plugged in"

G'day everyone,

Encountered this problem yesterday after I updated to the latest BIOS for Alienware X51 (A12). On the sound settings page, Windows would continually report that my HDMI cable was "Not plugged in" for audio, despite the fact it was passing video just fine.

The HDMI cable was connected to the onboard graphics port, rather than the mini-HDMI on the NVIDIA card.

I tried multiple solutions that I found online (and there are thousands of people with this problem, it seems, although they all have different systems and different cards).

In the end, the answer turned out to be a simple change of settings in the BIOS.

If you're having the issue, try the following:

1) On powerup, go into your BIOS settings (hit F2 on beep).

2) Find the "Integrated devices" options.

3) Change your default graphics from "Discrete" to "IGFX".

Voila. Windows will now see the HDMI cable as plugged in for audio.

There is a side effect, in that on boot your computer is now going to output to your HDMI cable. In my case I have a DVI going to my monitor from the NVIDIA card and an HDMI going to my home theatre setup from the onboard HDMI port, so the boot is now displayed on the TV rather than the monitor. But I can live with that.

Dell/Alienware, I hope this gets noticed and the bug fixed in future versions of the BIOS. (Or maybe it's a Windows issue. Not sure.)

Cheers! Hope this helped.